EDINBURG — A year into its COVID-19 testing program, UT Health RGV reached the milestone of 100,000 tests administered this month.

Technically, by Thursday they were somewhere around the 103,000 mark.

COVID-19 testing doesn’t get quite the attention it did a year ago, when hundreds would line up for hours to get swabbed at a makeshift tent collection site and tests were being conserved judiciously for people who met relatively specific exposure criteria.

Testing has increasingly become an ordinary part of the Rio Grande Valley’s medical infrastructure — a place experts say it’s likely to retain — and the spotlight has shifted over to vaccine distribution, which itself is becoming more commonplace.

Still, those 100,000 tests played an integral role in the Valley’s pandemic response, and the infrastructure put in place to facilitate them is likely to have long-term impacts on the UT Health RGV’s role on the South Texas medical scene.

Hidalgo County Judge Richard F. Cortez says he’s not sure what the area would have done without the university in the early days of the pandemic, describing them as a key player in the collaboration between the county, municipalities, state and federal resources, and medical institutions that spearheaded the area’s response to the coronavirus crisis.

“There was a lot of anxiety, there was a lot of frustration. There was a lot of fear,” he said. “And having them here with us was just tremendous. We have worked very well with them, they’ve always been very cooperative with every endeavor that we’ve had. Just a great partner. I can’t even imagine what we would have gone through had they not been here.”

The 100,000-test milestone doesn’t make much of an impression on Dr. John Thomas, the director of the university’s clinical laboratory, where those tests are sent to be processed.

One hundred thousand tests, he said, isn’t much different than 99,999 tests or 99,998 tests.

Despite that, Thomas says what his lab has achieved over the past year is something remarkable.

“I did some checking across the state metrics just to get an idea of what that number meant, and this lab has done about 25% of all the molecular testing that has been done in South Texas for COVID,” he said. “So it is a pretty meaningful number.”

That lab is the product of a year-long slog on the part of Thomas, his lab manager Juan Garcia and his grad students. They started testing COVID-19 samples in April 2020. The team turned the lab into a processing sweatshop, churning out results at almost all hours of the day.

The university backed that effort, buying millions of dollars worth of equipment for the lab and throwing incentives at those overworked grad students.

In May and June, toward the height of the pandemic, Thomas remembers the state flying down 2,000 samples on a private plane in the dead of night. By the time the lab had processed them, another plane would be touching down with another batch.

Thomas isn’t tired of COVID tests, exactly, but he is ready for a vacation. In his words, the last year’s been an “a— kicker.”

“It’s one of those questions, like: ‘How tired are you of going to work?’ You may not relish going to work all the time, but you like eatin’. You like paying your bills and stuff,” he said.

Dr. John Krouse, dean of the UTRGV School of Medicine, says it’s hard to underscore the importance that lab and the university’s sample collection sites played, especially in the earlier days of the pandemic when the virus was less understood and no vaccines were on hand.

In essence, he said, those tests were a lifesaver.

“I think what we were able to do with that, frankly, is probably save hundreds of lives in the Valley, through early detection, by offering drive-thru testing at four different sites,” he said. “We have always had and continue to have rapid turnaround. We were always able to do 24-hour turn around when others were taking five or seven days or even more, and if you take five to seven days the information isn’t very useful in advising people.”

Testing has slowed down at Thomas’ lab. They’re only running 200 to 300 samples a day now and they’re not exactly in crisis mode anymore.

Although it was borne out of necessity and built at a break-neck pace, that lab has turned into something that will play a more generalized — and more permanent — role for Valley patients.

The lab has transitioned into something that will test for more than COVID-19. They were supposed to have a ribbon cutting ceremony for the occasion in February, but the winter storm interfered and they had to tuck their giant scissors back in the closet.

Thomas says the lab will be able to test glucose, cholesterol, trigliceride, along with blood tests and tests for mosquito borne diseases like Zika, dengue virus, chikungunya — and, of course, COVID-19.

“What this means is we’ve kind of gone from being a one -rick pony to having about 200 different tests that we can do in house with another 200 or 300 that are going to be added to our test menu here in a month,” he said Thursday.

That’ll mean more revenue for the lab, more experience for students, and, importantly, faster turnaround times and more reliable results for Valley patients suffering from a variety of ailments.

“This lets us do testing on samples that would be sent to California and take two weeks to get a response to know what kind of cancer you have,” Thomas said. “Well, now we can have that test done up here and get that test back to the physician in one or two days. For things like cancer, that’s important.”

In the short term, it also means work hasn’t slowed at the lab. Although they’re not testing for the coronavirus at record levels anymore, they are wading through a morass of planning and problem solving for sample transportation and result delivery, and preparing for more federal inspections.

Thomas says the lab the crisis produced is the result of the blood, sweat and tears of a handful of mostly 20-something students willing to put in the work.

“This lab and this whole endeavor would not have happened if not for the students,” he said. “I mean the graduate students at UTRGV, I can’t say enough about them, particularly the students in my lab. None of them had to do this at all.

“They could have stayed home and played video games and ate popcorn and done everything on Zoom and just blown everything off, but they didn’t. The students sacrificed a lot.”

Judge Cortez says he thinks those efforts will pay dividends for area residents.

“I hope it plays a big role,” he said. “You know, we have a very high percentage of people that are uninsured. We have a very high percentage of people that are ill, that are sick. So having access to health care, those types of tests, at no-cost or a low cost is critical for us.”

To Krouse, the role that lab has played and the university’s overall role in pandemic response prove the merits of the relatively fledgling institution.

“I think it’s shown us that there is a role for an academic health center that can provide care across the Valley that is available to scale up as needed in these kinds of crisis situations that brings expertise in these kinds of diseases and how they expand and change over time,” he said. “So I think it really has demonstrated that we are an important player in the healthcare systems in the Valley and we’re an important partner for the healthcare systems.”

Noting the thousands of vaccines the university has already distributed and its plans to distribute more, Krouse said the fight against the coronavirus isn’t done yet.

“We’re not through,” he said. “We’re not done yet. COVID is still there, it’s still important for people to be careful. Especially if you’re not vaccinated, continue to practice the same social distancing and mask wearing. Get vaccinated. That’s the best thing anyone can do is get vaccinated.”


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